This blog describes Metatime in the Posthuman experience, drawn from Sir Isaac Newton's secret work on the future end of times, a tract in which he described Histories of Things to Come. His hidden papers on the occult were auctioned to two private buyers in 1936 at Sotheby's, but were not available for public research until the 1990s.

Wednesday, July 20, 2016

This post is the first of three - respectively on the economy, politics, and war - which describe how a negative Millennial history is emerging from disconnections between perception and reality. For today, see urbex explorer Josh wander through an abandoned bank, somewhere in America. It appears that this bank closed in the 1980s. To protect properties from vandals, Josh does not reveal names or locations of many of the places he visits. He does not remove anything from the sites, he only films and photographs them. You can see Josh and his friends explore dozens of abandoned sites in the USA and abroad, here.

Urban explorers are now poking through the wreckage of a transformed economy. That transformation depended on the 'virtualization' of property. Before 2007-2008, the economic value of property lay more in its assessed worth as a tangible historical object. During and after the Great Recession, the temporal perception of property changed to become a fleeting and mutable virtual investment, divorced from its actual physical condition and connection to society. The process started before that, but the recession was the hard turning point. In order to understand this change in terms of its long term consequences, it is important to separate the official story of the recession from the post-recession reality which urban explorers have uncovered.

Although urbex is the new Millennium's historical pastime, the perspective is based on experience, unmediated by historical knowledge, except for a Google search or two. Information on abandoned properties is suppressed on the Internet to discourage vandals and scavengers. Urban explorers seek history out, independently of the way it has been presented to them in the system. Josh thanks all his viewers, "even the haters," who jeer at his lack of knowledge. While urban explorers may not always know the historical context through which they move, they discover many things their viewers do not yet know.

Urban exploration reveals how rapidly the present is becoming the past. For some, the late 20th century and early 21st century are too recent to be considered historical. Urbex videos indicate how time is accelerating in everyday life, and why the past is being discarded at an alarming rate. It is not a pretty picture. Urban explorers document a secret history of incredible losses, shameful waste, and a throwaway culture which appeared over the past thirty years. Abandoned buildings and infrastructure are monuments to materialism, property bubbles, recessions and bankruptcies. The economic shocks are one thing. But the wreckage also confirms a deeper anti-historical malaise. Urbex confirms the need to revitalize historical awareness.

This urbex video was made in January 2016. According to Josh, the house was built in 1901; items left by owners date its abandonment to the Great Recession. Video Source: Youtube.

Josh's videos focus on locations abandoned around America from the 1980s, 1990s, or the early 2000s. Other disintegrating buildings have been abandoned for as little as 2-10 years. One house Josh and his friends explored (shown in the video above) dated from the moment when the Great Recession hit. An evicted family left a foreclosed property. Claimed by the bank and creditors, the property was not sold. The bank did not bother to liquidate the house's valuable contents. An online search reveals that this is a common problem. In addition, many houses and buildings, owned outright, are empty real estate investments which their super-rich owners do not bother to maintain. In these respects, urban exploration confirms that the Great Recession is far from over; an older legal system cannot cope quickly enough with the economic virtualization of property and the rapid redefinition of property's temporal value:

The Home Equity Theft Reporter, NYC, USA (3 December 2011): B[ank] of A[merica] At Center Of Another Public Nuisance; Burned Out, Dilapidated Pre-F[ore]closure Brownstone Sinks Quality Of Life On One Harlem Block

The Louisiana Weekly, USA (23 January 2012): Demolition by neglect: Historic homes left to rot by LSU-UMC

Loyola Consumer Law Review (Vol. 24, 2012; 13 June 2012): Toward a More Equitable Balance: Homeowner and Purchaser Tensions in Non-Judicial Foreclosure States

Realty Today (31 August 2012): Homes With Foreclosure Tag Left to Rot: "It's estimated that approximately 620,000 foreclosed properties in the United States are owned by lenders. But a majority of these properties have been abandoned and left to rot for more than two years, thereby reducing property prices and investment potential in these areas."

Reuters (10 January 2013): Special Report: The latest foreclosure horror: the zombie title

Evening Times, Glasgow, UK (10 January 2013): Why are so many of our buildings left to rot?

Independent, Yorkshire, UK (17 September 2013): The 40-room Yorkshire home frozen in time: Eerie abandoned mansion left to rot for THREE decades

National Trust for Canada (30 October 2013): Bellevue House. 525 Dalhousie Street, Amherstburg, Ontario—AT RISK OF DEMOLITION BY NEGLECT: "Dating from 1816 and connected with the War of 1812, one of the few remaining examples of Georgian architecture in Ontario is being left to rot by its owner. Even the national celebrations of the bicentennial of the War of 1812 were not enough for the municipality to enforce its own Property Standards bylaw to deal with this scandalous case of demolition by neglect."

The Journal, Dublin, Ireland (15 November 2014): Left to ruin: A rare glimpse inside Dublin’s last, great Georgian mansion

Prevent Loan Scams (December 2014): Who Can You Trust? The Foreclosure Rescue Scam Crisis in New York

Common Dreams (12 December 2014): Hunger, Homelessness on the Rise in Cities Nationwide: Report

Weather.com (3 April 2015): Eerie Images of New York Buildings Left to Rot

Rochester First, New York, USA (19 May 2015): Rochester residents are fed up with 'Zombie Properties'

Newsday and News 12, New York, USA (June 2015): Zombie Houses. Abandoned houses stuck in foreclosure are a neighborhood blight and a burden on the municipalities that have to take care of them. With thousands existing from Hempstead to the Hamptons, Long Island is being called the ‘epicenter’ of the problem: Comprehensive report, with a searchable map of zombie houses in New York state, here

The Straight Dope (13 December 2015): Why do banks leave forclosed houses to rot?: Question: "There has been a foreclosed house across the street from me for about 2 years. it's been just left to rot there has been no maintenance on it at all and I can see it falling apart. Why don't they either take care of the house or sell it? I cant imagin[e] them [m]aking money on it if it's just rotting with nobody living in it." Answer: "It could be an accounting sleight-of-hand. Suppose the mortgage was $200k, but the house is only worth $120k. Assuming the bank purchased the house for $200k at the foreclosure auction, if they sell it for $120k, they have to claim an $80k loss. If they don't sell the house, the[y] still carry it on their books for $200k."

Washington Examiner (22 December 2015): Report: Hunger, homelessness on the rise in major U.S. cities

Al Jazeera America (22 December 2015): Hunger, homelessness on the rise in major US cities, study finds

Zero Hedge (5 February 2016): These Vancouver Homes Sold For Millions In 2011 And Have Been Vacant And Rotting Since: Here's Why

The Toronto Star, Canada (15 February 2016): Exclusive: Family homelessness on the rise. A landmark report obtained exclusively by the Star reveals the devastating extent of child and family homelessness in Canada

The Inverness Courier, UK (18 February 2016): Anger over historic city sundial 'left to rot with the rubbish'

New Republic (18 February 2016): The Section 8 Voucher Trap. For Yonkers families, the search for affordable housing is long and weary

New York Times (20 February 2016): Market for Fixer-Uppers Traps Low-Income Buyers

One may ask what the point to the whole economic meltdown was, beyond the mendacious narrative that the recession is long over, the economy was saved, and financial lessons were learned. The stories we were told about the recession were not true, and the evidence lies in zombified properties of the upper, middle and working classes. We were told that inflated real estate speculation led to mortgages being approved to the economically unfit. In the subsequent meltdown, one could blame the poor, the government, or the banks. None of these three options was entirely correct.

First, Josh's urbex video above suggests that the mortgage crisis was complex and hit all corners of society. Homeowners still in the system might fall for an us-versus-them narrative: 'We are economically fit, whereas those who were not were granted mortgages when they did not deserve them. They almost destroyed the whole system, and thereby almost destroyed us. They deserve to be punished.' Racial and anti-immigration backlashes arose from this narrative.

On 17 February 2013, urban explorer Nate described how he witnessed the degeneration of foreclosed properties in Florida. Video Source: Youtube.

The second recessionary claim came from the American government. The public bank bailout would protect those with solid credit and preserve the American Dream. But the bailed-out banks let most foreclosed properties degenerate. This is where the claim dissolves before hard reality. Abandoned buildings, left to rot, mean that the point to the bailout was not to safeguard the principle of property ownership. On Youtube, search 'abandoned foreclosure' and you will find hundreds of videos on foreclosures from the Great Recession, starting with news reports early in the meltdown; these older videos display houses in better repair. More recent videos feature urban explorers filming derelict properties. A few examples:

Urbex videos show the tip of the iceberg. According to the linked reports above, since 2008, the banks have sold many foreclosed properties to Wall Street investors, who became landlords. But the majority of foreclosed houses were not sold and left to rot. It is hard to tell how many homes the banks allowed to degenerate because no thorough investigation has been conducted and no accurate records kept. That is the point! The banks did not bother to liquidate house contents or sell them, but kept houses on the books; they avoided formal accounting of downgraded zombie properties with inflated values. Local governments have responded to citizens' complaints about rotting, foreclosed properties by fining banks for non-maintenance. On 23 June 2016, Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York state, USA, signed into law the Zombie Properties bill:

"The law signed Thursday by Gov. Andrew Cuomo threatens banks with civil penalties up to $500 a day for failing to maintain residential properties once they’re aware of vacancies."

The banks have claimed bailouts for mortgage losses from the public via their governments. Most banks repaid their initial bailouts. Pro Publica keeps track of the original USD $700 billion bailout here, but the site does not track larger amounts which the government committed to propping up the financial industry. That grand total borrows against the future to pay for the mistakes and plunder of recent decades. In September 2010, PBSreported that the government had promised a total of USD $12.8 trillion to the banks. In July 2015, Forbesreported that bank bailouts for mortgage investment losses will be ongoing until they reach nearly USD $17 trillion - and that is only in the United States:

"Most people think that the big bank bailout was the $700 billion that the treasury department used to save the banks during the financial crash in September of 2008. But this is a long way from the truth because the bailout is still ongoing. The Special Inspector General for TARP [Troubled Asset Relief Program] summary of the bailout says that the total commitment of government is $16.8 trillion dollars with the $4.6 trillion already paid out."

In 2012, Al Jazeerareported on millions of foreclosures, which created homeless people, surrounded by empty homes: "It's at moments like this when the irrationality of the whole capitalist system becomes ... perfectly obvious. So you then start to say ... maybe we have to ... think about a completely different system." The report further asked: given the evident outcome of implemented solutions, would it not have been better for the government to bail out the people rather than bailing out the banks? In hindsight, if banks were going to let most foreclosed houses rot, would it not have been less traumatic and wasteful for the society as a whole to leave millions of original owners in those houses and allow the capital and resources in those properties to be defined and preserved in some new way?

This was the point made in the Yale Law Journal in February 2016, In Defense of 'Free Houses.' The article supported social compassion to maintain long term prosperity. More importantly, with the use of new technologies, banks could innovate and citizens could adapt to economic ups and downs. What should be studied now is the imaginative ways people coped with real fluctuations in wealth. How did they change their economic behaviour, roles, and small economies? Journalists and researchers barely bothered to find out, other than to offer a few human interest stories. In 2012, Occupy Homes activists repossessed foreclosed homes in Minnesota. In 2014, local artists turned foreclosed houses into art installations in Cleveland, Ohio. The real human interest story was the profound anguish and stress caused by removing housing, as a stable, temporally-grounded element from the socio-economic landscape.

Buildings have become virtual concepts in x-degrees of separation, to be moved around in computers and on balance sheets. This cryptic reconceptualization of property in a technologically-driven speculative financial system has diverged from the value of houses as concrete objects with temporal meaning. Zombie properties and the abandonment of historic sites reveal the hypocrisy, cynicism, and counter-factual madness of a system where a number in an accounting book is given more priority and is assigned greater perceptional economic value than waste, disintegration, and the squandering of historic legacies passed down, faithfully and intact, from previous generations.

Dan Bell's dead shopping mall urbex series (here) has explored the end of 1980s' consumerism. This is Owings Mills Mall, Baltimore County, Maryland (18 September 2015); the mall closed on 23 September 2015. Video Source: Youtube. See his earlier video of Owings Mills Mall with 1980s' news clips, here. For the August 2016 demolition of Owings Mills Mall, go here.

The third perceived story that diverged from reality was the total condemnation of the banks. This is controversial, because the financial industry was culpable, greedy and reckless. This fact has inflamed anti-Illuminati conspiracy theories, anti-statism, wild populism, and anarcho-libertarianism. Yet none of this explains how the banks got so far with their predatory practices. The financial sector ballooned in a society immersed in conspicuous consumption. For over three decades, 'greed is good' was the lifestyle mantra propagated by mass media and entertainment; consumption, rather than industry, became the measure of economic health. In many places, it still is. Consumerism is still encouraged among homeowners to the point of bankruptcy.

Although consumerism is fixated on material acquisition, it is anti-historical. In April 2015, Zero Hedgequoted Chris Martenson on the narrative beneath anti-historicism:

"The old narrative rests upon an ideology of endless growth. It wants and requires more of everything. More cars sold, more houses built, more jobs created, and more goods and services of every description sold next year than last. Everything flows from that want for more. The defenders of the old ideology are therefore defenders of our astonishingly-wide wealth gap, rapid energy depletion, emptying aquifers, disappearing pollinators, ruined soils, and dying oceans."

Endless growth is a seductive idea, but again, the story we tell ourselves does not correspond to real ebbs and flows in wealth. No system can grow upwardly on an infinite arrow of novelty. When periods of stagnation or contraction occur, the current solution is to create artificial endless growth until real growth returns. The artificial endless growth remedy involves bailouts, low interest rates, consumer credit, and cheerful media reports that artificial growth is a sign of the return of real growth.

The insistence on continual expansion creates a throwaway culture. Possessions and buildings are now treated less and less as historic artefacts. Councils do not legally compel absentee owners or investors to maintain properties. Historic buildings are not protected. In 2010, I interviewed British urban explorer, Phill Davison (here), who commented that the abandonment of historic sites, and of properties in general, reflected a failure of civil stewardship:

"All I can say about lost grandeur in places like Mount St Mary's [abandoned church in Leeds, UK] is it's official vandalism. Someone, whether it be the council, or property owner is responsible for allowing these grand places to fall into disrepair. A building's listed status will often condemn the property. For example, the building will be limited to a specific use, or the cost factor of restoring it to its former glory is too high."

Who, then, is responsible? Those on 'Main Street' can blame the poor, the immigrants, the government, the banks, the local councils, or their political (or perceived cultural) opponents. But all these problems begin with how we understand the passage of time, no matter where we are on the socio-economic ladder, and whether we are within the halls of power or without. We are seduced by disposable products, disposable culture, disposable relationships, disposable technology. Even when our homes become disposable, and then we become disposable, we don't get the message. We do not stop seeking something new and better.

"Ever wondered why historians and museums fixate upon coins? That’s because coins are made of durable metal and thus have a predictable tendency to show up in the archaeological record. The British Museum’s money room is full of physical objects, but that’s only because it’s impossible to display non-physical 'scorekeeping' systems (like ... reciprocity) in a public-viewing setting. It’s why generations of school children walk through hallowed museums, being taught that: In the past, money was all these beads and metals ...

The standard economics story describes ancient coins as spontaneous eruptions of economic necessity, but it’s equally plausible that they were political creations related to war ... . And those paper notes we use? People often associate them with states, but paper money was often privately issued by wealthy merchant traders and banks as promises that eventually came to circulate in trade. It was only when financial and political elites got together to establish central banks that paper money issuance was centralized in states. ...

[Y]ou need to challenge the sacred idea that money is a store of value, or that is ever has been. It is much more useful to conceive of money as a socially and politically constructed claim-upon-value. ... Money derives all its value from the things it enables you to get. It does not hold the value, but rather enables access to that value."

Thus, in Scott's view, money is a political or mercantile opportunity for you to do something. Without exploring the philosophical aspects of the argument, Scott implied that money is a way of being, a state of mind, a moment in existence, offering a continually-immediate potential. He did not think money should be viewed as a historical object, although he acknowledged that money can connect people to objects which may be grounded in history. This is where presentist distruptors may wish to meditate further, because in the housing market, currency met capital in a way that was supposed to relate citizens to the material and communal past and present and future. The Great Recession disconnected citizens from time.

As for the past, we are fascinated and shocked by how something so recently intact has become a grotesquerie, exploited and cast aside. Popular historical interest has not yet inspired institutions and communities to sponsor broad historical education and activism so that we may recover from the anti-historical malaise. There is a need to reappraise conventional notions of durability, preservation, conservation and sustainability, to create new ways through which those values can be expressed.

Urban explorers work at amateur history's and public history's most contemporary, cutting edge. They uncover temporal truths, in patterns no one else bothers to see. The way we record history and discuss it is changing. Urbex shows the impact of technology on the modalities of history: explorers' excursions are their research; their videos are their historical assessments. Social media sites provide forums for debate. The problem is that explorers' lack of formal historical training means that urban exploration videos become a form of entertainment. Even if explorers do not remove anything from buildings, viewers are left to wonder if explorers add anything to sensationalize their films, like fake blood spatters on house walls, or diabolical pentagrams (as below). The viewer cannot know whether these are marks of real or fake mayhem. History merges with social media fiction.

There is a need to improve memory. The situation demands a deeper connection with history, not as a repository of all that is outmoded, backward, regressive, and atavistic, but of unrealized potentials. The awareness of past context allows one to review long-asked questions, in a way that is continually open to new answers. The past is not gone and dead. If you could talk to people from the past, they would tell you that their work was not done and nothing in their world made the current state of affairs an absolute certainty. The regeneration of Millennial values depends on whether we change our perceptions of the past and present, and in so doing, find new hopes for the future.

At 12:50, Josh's friend Steve reflects on urbex and history. Video Source: Youtube.

As for values as they now stand, blighted properties are also sometimes abandoned due to natural disasters, crime, or scandals. That negative aura spreads to 'regular' foreclosed houses. Urban explorers constantly encounter signs of occult and black magic rituals in these lost buildings. Do they stage these findings? Whether they do or not, they are immersed in the temporal problem. It is tempting to think of a moral battle for temporal space, such that even before the urbex historians arrive with their cameras to document the degeneration of 20th century edifices for their 21st century social media accounts, the Satanists get there first. In the urbex video of the millionaire's mansion above, the cultists scrawled on the wall: We are the future.

About Me

Welcome to my blog, dedicated to the aporia, anomie, mysteries, and nervous tensions of the turn of the Millennium. I'm a writer and academic, trained in the field of history. These are my histories of things that define the spirit of our times. This blog also goes beyond historians' visions of the past, and examines how metatime and time are perceived in other media and disciplines, between generations, and in high and pop culture.